Hard Rain (The Hollyridge Press Chapbook Series) [Paperback]

Tony Hoagland (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 20, 2005

New poetry from award-winning poet Tony Hoagland.

Editorial Reviews

Review

An important collection for those interested in poetry that grapples with 21st century, consumer America. . . -- Gregg Mosson, The Baltimore Review (Summer 2007)

Product Details

• Paperback: 48 pages
• Publisher: Hollyridge Press (October 20, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0977229823
• ISBN-13: 978-0977229826
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6.2 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #467,516 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The cover is the review, December 3, 2005

By 

Richard B. Downing (hudson, Florida USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hard Rain (The Hollyridge Press Chapbook Series) (Paperback)

I first came to Hoagland's poetry through his second book, Donkey Gospel. Very good stuff, I thought. I'll try some more. Sweet Ruin, Hoagland's first, may have been even better. I did not hesitate a year later to advance order number three, What Narcissism Means to Me. The opening poems are among his best, but then there seemed a drop off. The rest of the book wasn't that bad, wasn't that good, so I hesitated when Hard Rain said Buy me! Buy me! But I relented. I figured Hoagland had given me two and a half good books (most poetry volumes give you two and a half good POEMS, if you're lucky; you know it's true).

In Hard Rain Hoagland steps up to the next level. That's right, to major poet. He has NO chance of becoming our county's Poet Laureate; that's how great this chapbook is.

There are maybe two clinkers in the batch (I like where "Greed" is going; it just never gets there). When I read a volume of poetry, I mark the poems I'll want to return to. Usually a pencil lasts me a long time. Not here.

I'll teach "Allegory of the Temp Agence" in my Poetry: Peace and Social Justice course. And "Requests for Toy Piano." And "Summer," a brilliant and frighteningly beautiful example of Hoagland transmogifying news event (the D.C. sniper) into poem: "what will we do if the sniper chooses us tomorrow...each step has a slender string attached." "Operations" should be sent to the White House and to FOX news. But who would volunteer to read it to them, to stress properly "Operation Infinite Self-Indulgence" and how "we tied flags to the antennae of our cars/that snapped like fire when we drove"? And who among such listeners could survive a "naked room full of shadows and light"? Still, Hoagland makes it fun to imagine.

And Hard Rain is fun. Dark fun. Witness the title poem's letter to Dear Abby in which blood is ignored for presents, that is, until we are exposed as the bloodletters: "I used to think I was not a part of this...but that was just another song...taught to me since birth."

In his poetry Hoagland has always looked at himself honestly - often in ways that aren't flattering, never in ways that are sentimental. What Narcissism Means to Me started to pull the rest of us into the lab that is our America. Hard Rain conducts the tests; this is "our marvelous punishment." Hard Rain is Hoagland's marvelous present.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Toward 21st Century Writing, April 3, 2006

By 

Book Lovers' Reviewer (Baltimore, Md.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hard Rain (The Hollyridge Press Chapbook Series) (Paperback)

I very much enjoyed this book and read it through breezily in two sittings, with a smile on my face, chuckling inside, now looking forward to reading it through again.

"Allegory of a Temp Agency," "Dialectical Materialism," "Hard Rain," and "Voyage" (which can be found at www.Poems.com)are among my favorites. I think Hoagland has written a book here that swallows and then displays our confused, polyglot, whirligig times. Plus, he leaves room for another poet to take some of the direction charted in "Hard Rain" the book, add more insight, and write not just a book that describes our times, but one that can change it.

If you liked Stephen Dunn's Different Hours, you'll like this. He has Billy Collins' clarity of sentence with more bite and substance. C.K. Williams' most recent The Singing would make an interesting companion to this. Good job T.H.! Thanks for the read. This book is prescient.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars poetry that challenges the essences of poetry, May 9, 2007

By 

Mr. Richard K. Weems "emperor_weems" (Fair Lawn, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hard Rain (The Hollyridge Press Chapbook Series) (Paperback)

Tony Hoagland is a funny, smart and appropriately bitter man. I am not speaking of Tony Hoagland the person here, but the poet. He is funny in a poem like "Romantic Moment," when a speaker, on a second date and after a movie that has some of his more primal instincts going, has to censure his fantastical mating rituals in the face of ettiquette, and Tony Hoagland is smart in a poem like "Cement Truck" or "Allegory of the Temp Agency," when he examines the stuff of poetry itself through the need (or lack thereof) of a cement truck in a poem or in the easy conclusions offered by a painting out to make a point and the need to curtail self-indulgence for the sake of art. And he is appropriately bitter in "Foodcourt" or "Operations," where he takes to task the essence of the American character through mall culture and the political rhetoric of war and what it could be as opposed to what it allows itself to be.

But the Hoagland I like best is when there is something of all three Hoagland's wrapped together. Of late, as in _What Narcissism Means to Me_, as well as here, Hoagland has taken on cultural challenges and has taken on, with both humor and a shaking finger (in all directions, of course), our political and national identities. He doesn't resort to dogma, fortunately (although I would love to see the twists and turns he would execute if brought onto Hannity & Colmes), and his commentary is wonderfully biting and full of smirks, but I get far more interested in poems like "Hostess" and the aforementioned "Romantic Moment," where the personal includes in its background the cultural and even political, but doesn't take steps that unfortunately snap back on themselves, albeit in even somewhat anticipated ways.

Hoagland the man has been wonderfully argumentative and confrontational in otherwise overly (and boringly) polite poetic settings, and attitude that manifests in his poetry as work that constantly challenge what the stuff of poetry really is, though this chapbook at times feels more like the ground work that may build him up to working all this together into an inspired whole down the line. If Hoagland challenges himself as much as he challenges others towards that art, I am sure he will strike the motherlode soon.